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Is the demand for PC computers crashing?

Shipments of personal computers have declined sharply lately, leading some to wonder if people just don't want personal computers anymore.

The market for personal computers is declining — and it’s only getting worse.

Worldwide shipments of PCs had their biggest drop in two years according to market research released this week, indicating that mobile devices and tablets and consoles may be gobbling up their market share, according to a Wired report.

Research firm Gartner noted a 9.5 percent decline in PC shipments in the second quarter of 2015 as compared to last year with 68.4 million units shipped, while research outfit IDC pegged it at 11.8 percent, or 66.1 million PCs shipped. As a comparison, about 61 million Apple iPhones were shipped.

This is bad news for PC manufacturers like Lenovo (20.3 percent share of the market), HP (18.5 percent) and Dell (14.5 percent), who are heavily reliant on the PC market for their sales. Only Apple was successful in generating growth compared to last year, and analysts believe that the release of the new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro back in March probably boosted those figures — not to mention the authority Apple has in the tech and smartphone world overall.

Of course, Apple doesn’t appear to be placing its bets on PCs. Macs only make up 10 percent of the company’s sales, compared to the iPhone which is 70 percent of its revenue.

It appears that while PCs still have a necessary role in society — after all, you can’t write documents or do much work on a smartphone — more and more of their features are being taken over by mobile devices.

That’s evidenced by some recent changes in the tech world, such as Google changing how its search functions in order to prioritize mobile-friendly sites, indicating that quite a bit of traffic is coming from those devices.